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“The Last Front” is a first-rate calling-card movie—a medium-budget project that feels much bigger because it puts all the money on the screen, as studio executives like to say, and that will make people want to trust first-time director Julien Hayet-Kerknawi with bigger budgets moving forward. But it seems more likely that it’ll be a Dwayne Johnson action…

Fittingly, director Tilman Singer’s “Cuckoo” feels very much like a bird’s nest in form and theme, namely in how it finds ways to coalesce multiple disparate strands into a cohesive whole.  The film sees seventeen-year-old Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) arriving in the German Alps with her father, Luis (Marton Csókás), stepmother, Beth (Jessica Henwick), and her seven-year-old…

“Cuckoo” gets more confusing the more it explains itself. The further writer-director Tilman Singer goes in articulating the strange goings-on that drive this stylish, unsettling thriller, the less compelling it becomes.    Trying to comprehend the hows and whys of this twisted mystery creates a distraction from which the film never recovers. Either we needed…

In 2013, Angela Patton gave a TEDXWomen Talk that went viral. She spoke about a program she created in Richmond, Virginia, to bring girls and their incarcerated fathers together in an environment that would make the fathers and daughters feel cherished and connected. These “Daddy Daughter Dances” have been so impactful the program has expanded…

The crimes of the Catholic Church are no secret to most citizens of the Western world. Yet, as is the case with many historical recollections, the deliverance of information is often filtered through a lens of whiteness, and victims of color fall to the footnotes. For many non-Indigenous people, the lack of awareness about the…